Sighting in Yutz, January 9, 2022

A witness was observing the Moon through a mount fitted with a Nikon P1000 camera when, at 7:53 p.m., they noticed two white points of light that seemed motionless, level with the red star Betelgeuse. They immediately aimed the mount at them, without any conclusive result. With the naked eye, they saw the two objects move slowly to the right (south-southeast), turn orange and take on a more or less spherical shape, then fade out gradually. The sighting lasted only a few seconds.

The case has medium consistency: a single witness and no images, but a few precise details on shape, colour and direction. Its strangeness was judged fairly low, and seems to stem mainly from the fact that the witness had read a "similar" account from the Pas-de-Calais on a social network. That other witness could not be traced, so the two observations could not be compared.

The appearance, shape, manner of disappearance, colours (especially at the very end), weather, time and day (a Sunday evening) all point to sky lanterns or LED light balloons, two closely related hypotheses involving objects carried by the wind. The orange colour and the way the lights went out favoured sky lanterns. The direction of travel did not match perfectly the wind recorded by the weather station 8 km away, but the very low wind speed, gusts and flight over a town could account for that. GEIPAN classified the case as B: probable observation of sky lanterns.